A supportive environment can bring out the best in an individual — even for a bird.
After an E.coli outbreak in 2006 devastated the spinach industry, farmers were pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife — and the foodborne pathogens they can sometimes carry — from visiting crops. A study published today from the University of California, Davis, shows that farms with surrounding natural habitat experience the most benefits from birds, including less crop damage and lower food-safety risks.
About the size of a small school bus, the basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean and is found in temperate and tropical waters across the globe. In the mid-1900s, basking sharks were observed by the thousands each year off California’s coast. Now they are rarely seen at all in this region, called the California Current Ecosystem, or CCE.
Concerns over foodborne risk from birds may not be as severe as once thought by produce farmers, according to research from the University of California, Davis, that found low instances of E. coli and Salmonellaprevalence.
Humans acknowledge that personality goes a long way, at least for our species. But scientists have been more hesitant to ascribe personality — defined as consistent behavior over time — to other animals.
Implications for Carbon Exchange in a Warming, Drying Tundra
15-year experiment on Arctic shrubs in Greenland lends new understanding to an enduring ecological puzzle: How do species with similar needs and life histories occur together at large scales while excluding each other at small scales? The answer to this question has important implications for how climate change might shift species’ distributions across the globe.
Conserving Rainforests Safeguards Cultural Connections Between People and Birds
Deforestation and a drying climate threaten the bird species that people value most, according to a recent study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of British Columbia.
Rahel Sollmann, an assistant professor in the Department of Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology, is a 2020 recipient of a Hellman Fellowship. She is the only CA&ES faculty member this year to receive the honor.
Study Presents Clear Opportunities to Conserve What Remains
Roughly half of Earth’s ice-free land remains without significant human influence, according to a study from a team of international researchers led by the National Geographic Society and the University of California, Davis.
Removing Natural Habitat Can Increase Growers’ Costs Up to 76% With No Detectable Effect on Food Safety
Conserving natural habitat around strawberry fields can help protect growers’ yields, their bottom line and the environment with no detectable threat to food safety, indicates a study led by the University of California, Davis.
